The Marvel Cinematic Universe might’ve had a gaming counterpart planned at one point called the Marvel Gaming Universe (or MGU). This is according to a new report which claims that there were once plans to create an “MGU” similar to the MCU, a connected series of Marvel games all tied to each other. However, plans for this ambitious venture fell through.
As revealed by The Game Post, on a recent episode of the The Fourth Curtain podcast, writer Alex Irvine and host Alex Seropian revealed that there was once a plan to created a connected Marvel Gaming Universe under one timeline, very similar to the MCU movies. While the idea was interesting and had potential, it sadly never materialised. “When I first started working on Marvel games, there was this idea that they were going to create like a Marvel gaming universe that was going to exist in the same way that the MCU,” said Irvine.
According to Seropian, who was SVP & GM of Core Games from 2009 to 2012 at Disney, there were plans in place to make the MGU happen, even before the MCU began to take shape. “When I was at Disney, that was my initiative, ‘Hey, let’s tie these games together.’ It was pre-MCU,” said Seropian. “But it didn’t get funded.”
Irvine added:
“Even back then, we were trying to figure out, ‘If there’s going to be this MGU, how is it different from the comics? How is it different from the movies? How are we going to decide if it stays consistent?’ And I think some of those questions got complex enough that there were people at Disney who didn’t really want to deal with them.”
Beyond the schematics of the MGU, there was also the problem of games taking a lot longer to develop than movies take to produce. Nailing down a release schedule with the same consistency of the MCU would be a massive hurdle, especially if games are delayed or shifted around (as is the norm in the gaming industry), which could’ve led to a very messy schedule, to say the least.
Right now, PlayStation first-party studio Insomniac Games seems to be doing a lot of the heavy-lifting with its Spider-Man games (not to mention NetEase’s Marvel Rivals), so it might be a very long time until we see a truly connected gaming universe actually pulled off.
Source: The Game Post
